by Jack Heath
I wait until it sounds like he’s a long way away before whispering, ‘That was close.’
Chloe doesn’t reply. There’s a bullet hole in her temple.
ALONE
A heavy ball of panic swells up in my guts. Chloe’s dead. Chloe’s dead. They killed her. They killed her, and now they’re going to kill me.
I can’t see any blood in the darkness, and for a desperate moment I convince myself that she might be OK. But there is no pulse in her neck. The bullet must have stopped her heart instantly.
I can’t hear the stalkers, but that doesn’t mean they left. They could be standing nearby, listening. I’m too scared to move.
So I sit, cradling my maker’s body, flinching whenever a leaf rustles in the breeze.
A voice echoes through the forest. ‘… to get out of here. Now.’
Another replies. ‘Only because you discharged your weapon, idiot.’
‘I wasn’t shooting to kill.’
‘Be sure to say that when you’re explaining how we lost her. You know the boss wants us to bring her in now.’
I can’t hear the first man’s response. Their voices fade as they leave the forest.
Three violent, well equipped men, at least. I’m in so far over my head it’s like I don’t even know which way is up.
If I stay here and tell the cops what happened, then I’ll end up in an evidence locker until my batteries run out. The crime is unlikely to be solved—I’m the only witness, and I didn’t see anything useful.
And Chloe said no police. I wish she’d told me why.
I could take the coward’s way out and leave town. But then what? My face will become famous when Chloe is reported missing, and even more so when her body is found. I’ll get caught.
There is one more option.
Shut up, I tell myself.
You could hide the body. You could …
Shut up, shut up.
You could hide the body and assume Chloe’s identity. You could find out who the three men are, and why they were following her. You could …
I could become an accessory to murder.
As I look into Chloe’s still, empty gaze, I remember what she said to me: Look after Mum while I’m gone.
Now she’s gone for good. By living her life, I could stop her parents from having to mourn their only daughter.
Chloe never cared about me. But I care about them. And, despite all the terrible things she did to me, I owe her my life.
I grit my teeth. This is impossible. I don’t know how to dispose of a body. The world is full of sniffing, digging animals, so I can’t bury her. She might become a surprise for some unlucky dog owner.
Chloe once watched a film in which a man was fed into a wood chipper. It gave her nightmares about being spread across the world in thousands of chunks, each and every one hurting whenever anyone stepped on it. Kylie’s reassurance that her brain would be pulped, and that she couldn’t feel pain without it, wasn’t very reassuring.
I don’t have a wood chipper. I could weigh her down and sink her in Lake Ginninderra, but I don’t have a boat, either. And the idea of Chloe Zimetski coming loose from her anchor, floating to the surface and revealing me to be an impostor is terrifying.
Concrete. Dogs can’t dig up concrete.
A half-built hotel stands beside the motorway. Trees have been uprooted and dirt chewed up by diesel-fuelled diggers. I could bury Chloe under what will become an asphalt car park, concealing her for centuries.
But it’s too far to carry her. I go through her pockets, and find a spare key to Graeme’s car.
The moonlight trickles through the trees, burnishing the corpse I’ve just decided to conceal. I’ve only existed for a couple of days. How did things go so wrong so quickly?
I whisper, ‘I’ll be right back, OK?’
Chloe doesn’t reply.
~
Graeme’s car, a compact chrome sedan, is parked under a tree on the nature strip. Chloe’s magnetic P-plates are stuck to it—he must have forgotten to take them off.
A button on the key makes the lights blink and the locks crunch. I climb in.
Wait. Do I even know how to drive?
The plastic steering wheel is familiar against my palms. I can picture myself driving. Chloe said she wore motion sensors for weeks to programme me with the movements I would need. Hopefully she borrowed the car at least once during that time.
The seat belt tightens across my chest. The key turns, the engine rumbles and I shift the gear stick into reverse. The car lurches away from the tree. It all feels fairly natural. I can do this.
But I can’t afford to relax. I have to be a better driver than Chloe ever was. Getting pulled over with a body in the boot would be an unfortunate end to my short taste of freedom.
I push the stick into drive and ease the car out onto the road. Dabs of dew sparkle in the headlights.
Clouds crawl over the moon as street lamps rush past. Part of me is afraid that when I get back to the forest, the body will be gone. The rest of me is afraid that it will still be there.
I turn off the headlights for the last few turns, in case the people who killed Chloe are still nearby. But the forest is motionless and silent. Perhaps I’m safe.
I park the car, leaving it unlocked, and creep into the trees. Every hanging branch looks the same in the dimness. I’m just starting to worry that I’m lost when I trip over the bushes we hid under and almost fall. Chloe is thin and floppy at my feet.
I put my hands under her armpits and drag her along the dirt, wincing at the cracking of each twig. Then I hook my arms under her knees and shoulders. Her head hangs back as I lift her. A hand flops against my neck as though trying to stop me. I hold still for a moment, reassuring myself that she hasn’t made a miraculous recovery.
If properly balanced, She’s Alive can easily bear up to 100 kilograms. Yeah, right. I can practically feel my battery dying.
When I get back to the car, I open the boot and use the light to check Chloe’s head for blood. I can’t risk getting suspicious stains all over Graeme’s car. The bullet didn’t go all the way through her head, so there’s no exit wound, but I’m not reassured.
A cardboard box from a washing machine delivered last winter is folded in the boot beneath some jump leads, a tyre iron, and a roll of duct tape. The box looks big enough, but Chloe won’t fit unless she stays curled into a ball. I place her on the ground, unfold the box and pick up the duct tape. I dig at the edge with a fingernail and peel a strip loose.
Minutes later, Chloe is bound and curled up in the box like a foetus in the womb.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and fold the flaps closed. I tape them shut and slide the box onto the back seat.
I climb into the driver’s seat, start the engine and pull out onto the road. Given the lack of traffic, it should be a twenty-minute journey.
Assuming, of course, that I know the way.
There’ll be holes in your recollections, and invented memories where your software has tried to plug the gaps.
What if I’m actually headed in the wrong direction? What if there is no half-built hotel, and I’m roaring down an endless road to nowhere?
Kylie used to say there was no sense worrying about things you can’t change. Chloe never found the advice helpful. I’m not having much luck with it either.
The suburbs shrink away into the gloom and now I’m on the motorway, strobing through the halos of orange street lamps. Moths flicker in the headlights like the static on an old cinema screen.
The dashboard lights tell me the tank contains 511 kilometres’ worth of petrol. I could stay on this motorway until the car shudders to a stop, a long, long way from here. Then I could leave the body on the back seat and walk away, plodding down the road until I reach a town big enough to disappear in. Newcastle, perhaps, or Coffs Harbour.
But I’d never find out who was following Chloe, or why. And I’d fail the task she set: look after her mother.
Halog
en lamps tower above the construction site in the distance. It’s my last chance to back out of this.
I don’t take it.
~
I should have known there would be security.
A guard—middle-aged, thick-necked, tapping his desk with a pencil—sits in an office the size of a portaloo beside the front gate. He’s watching TV rather than looking through the glass, but if anything moves between the motorway and the fence he’s likely to see it. Somewhere behind his office, a torch beam wobbles through the darkness.
One guard watching the front, one orbiting the perimeter. I can’t see any cameras, which probably means there are none. Security cameras are usually conspicuous, in order to deter criminals. Rather than employing somebody to watch camera feeds, the company must have decided to pay the guards to be here in person.
My titanium joints are tight with fear. It would be so much easier to go back. I tell myself that I can do this. I have to do this.
Soon the lights from the construction site are just spots in the distance behind me. I pull over in the shadows between two street lights and get out of the car. This far from the city, the silence is thick enough to drown in.
I heave the box off the passenger seat, close the door and start walking into the leaves and branches of the forest.
The cardboard protects my torso from the worst of the scrapes, but the twigs still drag painfully across my face and my arms. I suddenly realize how fragile I am. If my skin gets torn, it won’t grow back. I’ll be deformed for ever.
Soon I’m immersed in total darkness. The glow of the motorway and the construction site are smothered by the trees, and the moon is just a narrow hook in the sky. I keep walking in what feels like the right direction, telling myself that the partly built hotel is too big and bright to miss.
Sure enough, soon the fence is visible through the trees, silhouetted against the halogen lights within the construction site. I take cover behind a dense bush, peel one of my stockings off, pull it over my face and wait.
It feels like a long time before the guard appears, but it’s probably only four or five minutes. His torchlight crawls along the dirt near the fence, highlighting pebbles and shrivelled sticks. The guard—a skinny guy, young—strolls six or seven metres behind it.
He looks like he could run faster than me, if he had to. He’s singing a song under his breath. He isn’t quite sure of the lyrics. Every second or third syllable is ‘bop’ or ‘doo’.
The beam of the flashlight sways past, tickling the leaves above my head.
The guard stops singing.
I hold my breath, and curse myself for breathing unnecessarily in the first place. Has he seen me? Should I run?
The guard sneezes. Sniffs. Keeps walking until he’s out of sight.
If I move too soon, he might hear. But the longer I wait, the less time I have before he comes around again. After two minutes I rise to my feet like a ghost from a burial plot.
The fence is a little taller than me, and made from a grid of thick steel wires. No room to crawl under, and no time to dig a hole.
Climbing it will be hard. Climbing it silently will be harder. Climbing it silently while holding a dead body in a box will be impossible.
A silty pile of dirt sits on the other side, a little further along the fence. I walk parallel to it, balance the box on top of the wire and give it a shove.
It lands in the pile with a faint whumpf that I’m ninety per cent sure the guards didn’t hear. But it tips onto its side and Chloe tumbles out, the duct tape tearing loose, her arms and legs flopping to the ground like tentacles.
The wires are hard in my fists as I pull myself up. The fence rattles no louder than it would on a windy night. Soon I’m straddling the top, then swinging my leg over as though dismounting from a horse. I drop down on the other side.
No time to stuff Chloe back into the box. Her heels leave trails in the dust as I drag her away from the fence with one arm, holding the box under the other.
Tripwires lattice the ground, showing where walls will some day stand. Concrete obelisks—the foundations—rise above the pebbles and dirt like miniature skyscrapers.
Construction has come a long way since Chloe last saw it. If I’m successful, she’ll be sealed under a finished hotel in no time.
In the centre of the site yawns a rectangular pit, deep enough to fit Chloe’s whole house. The dirt floor is perfectly flat, ready to have concrete poured into it. This will probably be a basement car park.
I skirt around the edge until I reach the ladder balanced against the side. Then I take one last look around. Neither of the two guards is in view. With the dead body balanced over my shoulder, I descend into the pit.
~
My feet clunk down the rungs, two at a time. Part of me is glad I won’t have to carry Chloe back up this ladder. The rest of me is horrified by the callousness of that thought.
I’m about to cover up a murder and spend the rest of my life lying to the victim’s family. Whatever ethics I was programmed with, they haven’t worked.
Thinking about it makes me feel ill. Maybe the Open AI Community thought the sensation of guilt was good enough.
When I reach the bottom, the floor of the pit looks so smooth that I half expect to disappear into it, like quicksand. But it’s tightly packed under my shoes. Digging won’t be easy. I walk Chloe and the box over to the middle of the pit.
There are no shovels, but a bucket and a pickaxe lie nearby. The grip of the pickaxe is slippery against my palm. I angle the blade the right way and swing it into the dirt. It punches a neat hole in the ground; narrow, but deep.
I swing again, and a second puncture opens up next to the first. It takes only a few minutes to make a grid about the size of a coffin.
The bucket works better than I’d expected at scooping out the grit. Now that the ground has been aerated, I can get the lip under the surface and drag out long trenches. After ten scoops, the hole looks wide enough. After forty, it’s deep enough. I hope.
I fold the box, drop it into the hole, and roll Chloe’s body onto it. Her arms splay out, and I tuck them in by her sides. She hasn’t yet started to smell, and the colour is still in her cheeks. She could be asleep.
Just to be sure, I check her pulse again.
Nothing. Her skin is cold as glass.
I pick up the bucket and start pouring the dirt back in. It spatters her knees, her belly, her neck, growing across her like shadows lengthening at sunset.
It’s hard to drop dirt on a human face. I look away as I do it.
Smoothing out the silt takes longer than digging the hole. At first I try using the flat side of the pickaxe blade, but it leaves too many grooves and lumps. After a few failed strokes, I get down on all fours and sweep the dirt with my palms, patting it down in places. Soon my hands and knees are black, but looking at the ground, no one would know there was something beneath.
I put the bucket and the pickaxe back where I found them and scan the ground for signs that I was here; footprints, hand prints, scraps of duct tape. There’s nothing. I look up at the sky, to see that the clouds have moved on, revealing thousands of glittering stars. The sun won’t be rising for at least a couple of …
The skinny guard is standing on the edge of the pit, staring at me.
ON THE RUN
‘Hey,’ the guard says. Then, as if his brain is just catching up: ‘Hey!’
It’s over. I’m caught. I’m dead, or will be soon.
A thought flashes through my mind: In that case, running won’t make it any worse.
I sprint away from the guard. It will take him a while to circle around the pit to the top of the ladder. Maybe I can climb it before he gets there.
Maybe not. My feet pound the dirt.
‘Intruder,’ the guard yells. ‘Ivan, we got an intruder!’
His radio bleeps and hisses. I hear a thud as he jumps down into the pit and dashes towards me. He must have decided that circling around would take too lo
ng. Now he’s heading right for me—and he’s catching up.
His breaths, ragged and fast, get louder. My body refuses to move fast enough to save me.
I throw myself at the ladder, clawing at the rungs. I’m barely three metres up when I feel it wobble. He’s climbing after me, right beneath my shoes.
A hand grabs my ankle as I haul myself over the lip of the pit. My battery jolts and, as I shake the hand off, I kick the top of the ladder. The guard yelps and hurls himself clear as the ladder tips over backwards, creaking and rattling, before crashing to the dirt below.
I scramble to my feet and dash away from the pit, weaving through the piles of dirt, racing towards the fence. But the middle-aged guard, Ivan, emerges from the other side of a stack of cement slabs. I duck behind a pile of two-metre long steel rods used to reinforce concrete.
I don’t think he saw me, but he’s blocking my access to the fence. I can’t move unless he does.
The other guard will be propping up the ladder right now. As soon as he comes out of the pit, he’ll spot me. I’m trapped.
I can’t hear Ivan moving. I peek between the rods, trying to work out where he is.
His stone-grey eyes fix on mine. ‘There!’ he yells, as he starts to run in my direction. ‘Freddie, I got her!’
I grab one of the rods and wrench it out of the stack. Like a baseball player, I take a practice swing. The rod cuts noisily through the air, bending a little.
Ivan stops running, eyes widening. ‘Whoa there,’ he says, as though calming a horse.
‘Stay back,’ I yell. The stocking vibrates against my lips.
Ivan looks over my shoulder. I follow his gaze to see the young guard, Freddie, edging towards me.
‘Both of you,’ I say. But when I turn back to Ivan, he’s moved a little closer.
I can’t fight them off. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. I don’t want to hurt them. They’re just doing their jobs.
But I can’t get caught. My life is at stake.
I bolt sideways, racing towards the corner of the construction site. Both of them give chase immediately—I can hear their boots thudding into the ground. They’re gaining on me. But the fence is only fifteen metres away.
